No matter how much I try I can’t get the stupid media streamer working 100%, really beginning to get on my nerves.

When I moved into the house I’m in at the moment I brought my server (WOPR) with me as well as my enormous media collection, unfortunately the mini-ITX box we had as the media centre wasn’t mine so it remained behind.  Luckily I’ve got a 360 which is capable of streaming from a media server and there are a few around for linux.

At first we ran twonkymedia, which is pretty good, but as it is commercial software an alternative had to be found when the trial ran out.  I had my mind set on purchasing a licence for it but only one thing stopped me.  No transcoding.  Since the 360 only played specific formats, a lot of the media in my collection is unplayable from the 360 and this was unacceptable, so twonky had to go.

I looked around and found a few opensource/free alternatives, one of them being fuppes and the reason fuppes stood out was because it claimed to support on-the-fly video transcoding, which would solve all my problems.  Getting it up and running wasn’t too tricky and we’ve been using it for a long time now.  Unfortunately there was 2 major issues with it.  The first is that the video transcoding doesn’t work, no idea why it doesn’t just refuses to do it as if the feature never existed even though the web interface claims it is enabled. And 2, every now and then while watching something on the 360 the video goes *BLDFDBLBFFASDBlarg* and dies, which I think maybe a caching issue since we’re running it over wireless.

But lately a 3rd issue has arisen (well not really lately but it’s become much more of an issue lately) and that is the database is failing to rebuild itself, I think I’ve reached the maximum size cause SQLite is now complaining halfway through an index rebuild that it is having IO errors or cannot write to disk (even though there is loads of space left).  I’ve been playing with SQLite trying to figure out if there is any issues with my installation of it and at first I thought there was, various libraries were reporting different versions, but that’s been fixed now and it does seem to rebuild faster, but it still crash and burns .

Anyway, I’m sure that I can sort out the rebuilding but I’m still at a complete loss as to why the video transcoding just doesn’t want to play.  Quite a few people on the forums claim to have gotten it to work but I can’t see how.  Even when I use their configs I get nothing, not even a debug message at the console.  I’m running the most recent revision from the SVN (0.627 from memory) but nothing.  Also the sourcecode hasn’t been updated in absolutely ages, which someone with better programming prowess than myself would take up the development of fuppes, I think it’s pretty good, just really buggy at the moment.

If I can’t work out how to sort it out soon I’m going to have to get rid of it and try another media streamer but I didn’t see many others which supported transcoding.

Bah…

Ugh, I can’t believe how they get away with it.

My home Internet has been out for over a week now and Virgin Media are difficult to deal with.  They keep blaming the outages on their customers so they don’t have to compensate them, it’s taken this long to get them to admit there is a fault with their system somewhere.

The first time I contacted them I decided to humour the guy at the end of the phone by following his instructions (even though I had been furiously doing exactly the same only moments before), which didn’t yield any positive results… as was expected.  He then said he’d send out an engineer (like they’d be of any use), so said OK, but unfortunately had to cancel since no one would be hope.  It’s silly, they can only send someone out during the hours when everyone is at work.

Anyway, my housemate called up the next day (Internet was still out) and followed the so-called troubleshooting again (they wouldn’t budge on the skipping ahead, morons), which resulted in – you guessed it – nothing!  So they said they’d send us a new modem (no you idiots, the problem is YOUR end), anyway we got our new modem but then had to ring up to activate it.  This time round they would only take a call from the contract holder (ugh…) so we called our 3rd housemate who was up in Cambridge at the time and told him to call them.

Funnily enough when the modem was activated the Internet came back up for a whopping 1 hour before it died again, about 5 minutes after I got home from work.  So we rang up again and this time after the whole song and dance of the troubleshooting routine, they finally went “Oh, wait a second, there’s a fault in the line.”, no shit Sherlock, we already knew that and we’re betting Virgin Media knew that as well but ran out of excuses to fob us off :/

I can’t believe companies can get away with treating their customers like shit and blaming us for their problems?  Like I said earlier, probably cause if they admitted their faults from the beginning they’d have to compensate us as well as everyone else they are fucking over, which is probably going to amount to a LOT of money.  Broadband companies need to be held accountable to their unscrupulous behaviour in my opinion.